How to install CyberPanel and setup WordPress with LSCache

February 8, 2018

CyberPanel is a website hosting control panel which is free, open sources and includes several features. It uses OpenLiteSpeed as the web server which makes it stand out from the rest. OpenLiteSpeed is developed and maintained by LiteSpeed Technologies (and for the record, they do excellent in their field). OLS is not just open source, but also lightweight and offers high performance.

One of the special features of this web server is built-in page cache (LiteSpeed Cache) which is similar to Varnish. Besides, upon installation of CyberPanel, it doesn’t require any other action to start using this cache neither does it adds extra overhead to the server.

Requirements

For the purpose of this tutorial, I’ll be using and you’ll require:

VPS with atleast 512 MB ram and 10 GB Disk Space

Centos 7

I’ll be using 512MB VPS from Vultr for purpose of this tutorial, their prices are quite low and offers good performance. For production, I’d recommend to use vps with atleast 1GB ram.

Getting Started: Installation

We’ll start off by confirming that wget is present on the server. So, log in to the SSH

Installation can take time ranging from 10-15 minutes approx. Once the installation is complete, it will show you URL to login and credentials to use.

First thing first

The first step after installing any panel should be changing admin password. It also applies to CyberPanel, while some panels may use random or root password, CyberPanel by default uses `1234567` as password (while writing the post). So, let’s change our admin password.

Click on the “Caret Down” icon beside name on the header to open the dropdown and click Edit profile.

We can now move to our primary object

Adding a new website in CyberPanel

Navigate to Create Website (option present under Websites group in sidebar) then select and fill input fields accordingly.

With this step, our website is added to the CyberPanel and ready for us.

Installing WordPress with LSCache in CyberPanel

Navigate to Websites -> List Websites under the Main group in sidebar. This will open dashboard for your website and you can now perform actions from this page.

Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click WordPress with LSCache. This will present you an optional field for entering path to your installation. If left blank, it’ll assume your public home directory (public_html) that is domain itself as path. To begin installation, click on the button named Install WordPress.

You may get installation failed error upon doing so. This is because CyberPanel creates a default index.html file inside your public_html folder. To fix this, you can use File manager (link present on the same page) to remove the file.

WordPress should now be installed on the domain along with LSCache plugin.

Configuring WordPress for LSCache in CyberPanel

Upon opening the URL for your website, WordPress will ask you to fill few fields as information for your website. It includes admin username and password. Upon complete installation, log in to admin panel and goto plugins section.

CyberPanel by default, may not install latest version of the plugin. So first step in the section is to update our LiteSpeed Cache (LSCache) plugin. And oh, well you can remove Hello Dolly as basically serves no important function (atleast not for me).

You can then activate the plugin. Upon activation, it’ll start serving its functions.

We can verify it by looking at response header of our website. If it contains “X-Litespeed-Cache: hit” then the page was served was served by LiteSpeed Cache directly without PHP.

You can play around with settings of this plugins to improve the performance for your setup.